42 Best WooCommerce Plugins to Expand Beyond the Basic eCommerce Shop

The glory of WooCommerce lies in the fact that it’s completely opensource. That means your average developer can tap into the API and make a plugin that improves the functionality of WooCommerce.

WordPress users are used to this type of system, since it seems like any feature desired can be provided with a search for a simple WordPress plugin.

The same goes for WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is a plugin in itself, but you can also find other plugins to extend what WooCommerce can do. For example, you may want to build an event booking site or one that offers car reservations or direct checkout buttons.

So I rolled up my sleeves and dug through dozens of solutions, eventually landing on the 42 best WooCommerce plugins for your store. Enjoy!

A few of these WooCommerce plugins are actually considered extensions. Regardless of the categorization, plugins and extensions both function the same way in expanding the feature-set for WooCommerce. One of my favorite extensions is called WooCommerce Subscriptions and it configures a system where customers sign up to receive products and services over a period of time.

It’s a wonderful way to make recurring income, as users signup for weekly, monthly or annual subscriptions. Although it’s one of the more expensive plugins on the list, a serious subscription business can break even with just a handful of subscriptions. Along with the basic subscribe tools you get support for over 25 payment gateways, user plan management and renewal notifications.

The WooCommerce Direct checkout plugin has a premium version for additional product settings and buttons. Most merchants will find the free version suitable, since it provides a few buttons that direct users to the shopping cart. This is similar to Amazon’s one-click checkout, but it technically adds another step for filling in the shopping cart information.

Whereas the standard checkout process involves a customer adding a product to the cart then manually navigating to the cart, this offers an immediate redirect, expediting the process and increasing your conversions without having to pay anything for the feature.

If you’re managing a WordPress theme that wasn’t initially designed for WooCommerce you may be missing the menu cart icon in the upper right hand corner of your header. The WooCommerce Menu Cart plugin solves that problem with the cart icon and other options like the total cost of the cart and how many items are included. Custom CSS allows for adjusting the look and feel, while the float settings move around the cart with the click of a button.

The premium version goes for $19.95, and it provides more cart icons to choose from, a shortcode to place the cart icon anywhere on your site and a flyout for featuring cart details. This is yet another plugin where most merchants will be fine with the free solution, yet the paid one is there if you need it.

The example in the screenshot visualizes the functionality of this WooCommerce plugin rather well. Let’s say you’re running a pizza delivery shop and you’d like to customize a wide range of product options. You can display checkboxes for items like pepperoni, onions and pineapple.

A full form builder opens up an incredible number of options for your product pages, while the extra price fields support global and per product implementation. The tool even has conditional logic depending on what the user selects, along with image replacement when a certain checkbox is checked.

The Subscriptio plugin offers a far more affordable way to collect money for subscriptions compared to the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. It’s not as pretty, but it has settings for recurring billing cycles, optional setup fees and expiration dates. You’re limited to the PayPal and Stripe payment gateways, but I would assume these are two of the most popular options.

I enjoy that each subscription flow is visualized in the dashboard, giving you insights into when you might need to give a customer a little treat to stick around. You’ll also notice that all subscription events are logged into a list, expanding your knowledge on the health of your user base.

Sales figures are often dictated by the quality and number of emails sent out through your WooCommerce store. Upsells, reminders, receipts and newsletters all contribute to the constant flow of communication between you and your customer. The Email Customizer plugin has transactional emails, using various colors, footers and branding tools for making your emails look much more pleasing to the eye.

The email text is fully editable and it allows you to insert social media buttons. Services like MailChimp have offerings like this, but they cost more and most transactional emails go through your website anyway. A bonus comes in the form of resending and previewing emails, just in case a customer never got an email or if you’d like to ensure that your emails look good before sending out.

The WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts plugin offers advanced, dynamic pricing adjustments for a wide variety of situations. For instance, you might want to offer all of your merchandise at a certain price before midnight. Or maybe you’d like to give away one free item after customers buy five. The options are pretty strong with this plugin, seeing as how they’re made to increase urgency and boost conversions.

Some of the settings allow for product specific rules, while others are for adjusting pricing for your entire store. Feel free to set promotional start and end dates, and utilize the pricing table to display how much money people save when they buy a certain number of products.

I’m fond of the WooCommerce Advanced Shipping plugin for two reasons: It offers highly customizable shipping options and it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. You can configure your shipping based on conditions like quantity, weight, stock and subtotal. There’s no coding required, and it lets you create multiple shipping methods to provide your customers with some options.

Shipping is setup by country, state, city or zip, and they even have settings for shipping based on product elements like weight and category.

The booming customization industry (like customizable shirts) is often seen as a job for custom coders. However, a few WordPress plugins insert a design module onto your website for a small price. For example, the Fancy Product Designer plugin has support for users to design their own t-shirts (as seen in the screenshot below).

You don’t have any limitations to the products being designed on your site. Customers can design anything from mugs to shoes and wine bottles to marketing materials. The plugin supports media uploads, and the image, text and color transformations are all done in real-time, displaying a beautiful result for customers to order right after.

Product and variation edits take loads of time, especially if you’re working with hundreds or thousands of products. The WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit plugin cuts down the process by giving you searchable, editable fields in a spreadsheet-like format.

Create, delete and duplicate products with the click of a button, and set things like category, pricing and product descriptions in bulk. Therefore, if you’d like to set a sitewide sale for Christmas, it only requires one task instead of going through and adjusting every single product.

Here’s another product designer so that you have some variety to choose from. The interface looks a little different in that your product design options are displayed on two bars, one to the left and one to the right. Social media sharing buttons show up on the design pages as well.

All types of product designs are available, from t-shirts to business cards. I also noticed that the developers have put a significant amount of time into the mobile version of the designer. Therefore, customers can swipe around, select their media and text, and make their orders from the convenience of their smartphones or tablets.

WooSwatches offers a more visual environment for product colors and variations. The WooCommerce variants generally default to dropdown menus where customers select their colors. However, this actually shows the colors to give people a something akin to shopping at a real store.

Images are supported as well. If you haven’t noticed, swatches like these are commonplace on Amazon. A simple tool like this should be a nice boost to your conversations as they complement the actual product images in your store.

WooSlider comes from the folks at WooCommerce, and it’s the most efficient way to get a versatile slider on your website when your WordPress theme lacks one. I like the slider since it can be placed anywhere on your website. So, a blog post might serve as a good spot for a promotional slider, or a contact page could even slide through images of your headquarters.

Feel free to link to slides, attached images or posts, and change around the slider settings to control what the slider looks like to customers. For example, you might desire a slider that runs on its own, with the option for customers to click on arrows to the left and right.

Consistently recovering abandoned carts is far easier than trying to go out and find new customers. After all, these users already showed some sort of interest in the product, so why not remind them about the cart with an email?

The first email sent includes a link to the abandoned cart for them to click through and finish the purchase. You have the option to send out as many reminder emails as you want, some of which might include coupons.

The WooCommerce company features Sensei extensions on its website, so I recommend seeing if any of the solutions can fulfill any of your needs. The majority of the extensions are completely free, but a few of the premium options will cost you money.

Seeing as how most eCommerce stores have to export and import data at some point, this plugin provides the opportunity for just that. WooCommerce gives you all the reporting and fulfillment tools needed in the dashboard. However, sometimes you’ll have to export a list of orders or customers to your CRM or accounting software.

If some of your current systems don’t integrate directly into WooCommerce, the export will do the trick for you. All customer data (like name, email, customer status and more) can be exported or imported. You can also create your own custom export formats and generate recurring exports depending on the tools being used.

Although the development of this plugin has stopped, it still works fine and you can find support information through the general forum. The plugin lets you print invoices and delivery notes by working through your WordPress dashboard. Printing can be done through the dashboard as well.

You may need to occasionally print out your invoices in bulk, so they have a tool for that as well. Overall, you can completely customize each of the invoices going out to customers, and they even have refund and print buttons with each invoice that gets sent out.

The WooSidebars plugin takes your widgetized areas on a website and overrides them so that each of your pages displays different widgets. This comes in handy when you’d like to upsell or advertise more relevant products or services on certain pages.

Customizing your checkout page fields comes easy with the WooCommerce Checkout Manager plugin. You get to change, hide and delete some of the default checkout fields, and you can even make some of the fields optional so that your customers don’t have to fill everything out.

About 15 field types are provided, including radio buttons, check boxes, select options, text areas and more. There’s also an order/customer CSV export tool, which could potentially get rid of your need for a completely separate plugin.

If you’ve ever tried to promote affiliate products on your eCommerce shop you know it’s a pain in the butt. Locating products is time consuming, and you run into problems with products that’re no longer part of the program or those that don’t sell on Amazon anymore.

The WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates plugin verifies whether or not a product is available for all locations, and it automatically imports items like product descriptions, photos and pricing. Product shortcodes are provided for placing the items anywhere on your site. My favorite part is the advanced search, speeding up the product finding process and minimizing your time in Amazon.

Establishing an auction site like eBay or eBid requires a certain set of tools for dynamically changing the deals and auctions running on your site. You obviously can’t keep track of the auctions manually, so it’s all going on in the background with this WooCommerce plugin. The primary features include shortcodes for placing auction-able items on different pages. Some folks might even want to make a blog post that features an auction towards the end.

Normal, reverse and silent auctions are all possible, and you get to define different prices like starting prices and reserve pricing. The start and end times for auctions are all customizable, while the display of said auctions comes easy with the help of featured widgets. For example you can setup a widget that shows all of the auctions ending soon or coming in a week. Along with beautiful auction product pages, email notifications and a full page for the auction history, the WooCommerce Simple Auctions plugin is pretty neat.

It didn’t take me long in the eCommerce business to realize how important custom fields are. These are the variants and extra options you get to choose from when selecting a shirt or other product, and they particularity come in handy when you’re shopping for a customizable item. The WooCommerce Custom Fields plugin adds plenty of custom fields to your online store.

One store might offer custom engravings, while another might have a little text box for sending out a birthday message for gifts. Another good example involves events. If you’re collecting registrations for a business conference it makes sense to ask where people are from, if they have any dietary restrictions for the meal and which room they’re going to need in the hotel.

Speaking of events, the FooEvents for WooCommerce plugin manages them all for you. Whether you’re selling tickets or simply collecting a list of people who are coming to a business meeting, this plugin has you covered. The selling of tickets connects directly to WooCommerce, so all of the payments are processed through your regular system. You receive HTML tickets for custom branding, and the multiple ticket types cater to different industries.

Embedded barcodes are there for scanning people in, and the mobile apps work for people to check-in on their phones and tablets. This WooCommerce plugin allows you to configure multiple events, and the CSV export is printable for the day of the event.

Consider the Projects by WooThemes plugin if you’re trying to make a portfolio on your eCommerce shop. Some WooCommerce themes already come with this functionality, but if not, you can install this plugin for free. The project information includes images, categories, client information and links to more details. It integrates just fine with WordPress and WooCommerce, and you can utilize the various shortcodes and widgets.

The Projects plugin works on all mobile devices, and all of the hooks, filters and templates expand the possibilities for customizations.

Our Team by WooThemes gives an inside look at who is working behind the scenes at your company. A great way to make your brand look more personable is to showcase pictures of your staff, from customer support reps to the executives. The plugin reveals thumbnail images of the people, with links, titles and descriptions.

You can link to social media profiles so that everyone in your organization reaps the benefits of the exposure. The whole point of the plugin is to look as clean as possible, so you’re not going to have to mess with too many settings.

The Features by WooThemes plugin has a similar look and feel to the Our Team plugin above. It’s designed to fit on any page or post, with separate items that you can customize for the various features offered through your company. I figure you can also use this for services or products, but the main point is to visually list off features from your software or other product.

Shortcodes, template tags and widgets are all provided for scattering the feature listings throughout your site. They also have some nice icons so that your features don’t look so plain and boring.

Here’s yet another free plugin from WooThemes that generates a module with simple images and text. This one, however, focuses on testimonials from past and current customers. You create items similar to a regular post in WordPress, add a name, testimonial and a picture of the person. Shortcodes, widgets and template tags are provided as well, so customizing and inserting the testimonials are pretty quick.

The WooCommerce Currency Switcher sells for the price of nothing, but the premium version goes for $27. I strongly recommend testing out the free version first, as I’m not sure the unlimited currency counts is necessary for everyone. However, the free option only gives you two currencies, so you can make your decision based on that.

Anyway, the WooCommerce plugin is compatible with a wide range of other plugins and extensions like WooCommerce Stripe Gateway by WooThemes, PayPal for WooCommerce, WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips and WooCommerce Subscriptions. The currency switcher tool is mainly run through a shortcode, but three widgets are provided as well. Overall, it does a solid job of switching currencies right on the product page.

I’ve talked a bit about some other CSV importers and exporters, but most of them are sold at a price. This one is completely free, but you only gain access to the importing part of the equation. That said, some companies only require that.

If you’re getting started with an online shop and you don’t want to punch in every product manually, this is the best route to take. You compile all of the product details into one CSV, upload it to WordPress, then everything shows up in the product pages.

Mailchimp offers several WordPress plugins, yet this is one of their sleekest. A few translation files are included with the package, but the main reason I like it is because you can prompt customers to subscribe to your email list after order creation, after order processing and after order completion.

The plugin works with interest groups you configure in MailChimp, and you can control the labels, fields and opt-in information shown on every single subscription box. The placement of the box is customizable as well so you don’t annoy people as they walk through the checkout process.

The Stripe plugin doesn’t cost a dime until you start making sales. It does have your standard Stripe transaction fees, but that’s to be expected with any payment gateway. The main point of the WooCommerce Stripe plugin is to integrate immediately with your store for accepting payments without any problems.

Accept just about any type of major payment method, and allow customers to save their payment methods in their profiles. Stripe is available in various countries such as the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland and The Netherlands. That’s why it’s one of the top payment gateways in the world.

The WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping plugin has both free and premium versions. The plugin calculates shipping rates based on things like weight, destination and cart total. The premium version is worth looking into for its state and zip-based shipping zones. And you can initiate easy backups, calculate percentage costs and quantity-based rates.

The free version supports unlimited shipping zones and rates. Handling fees are shown, and it lets you make tiered shipping costs based on cart total and weight. As you can see, the non-premium version is far more advanced, but some smaller stores might be fine with the free one.

It’s surprising how many online stores don’t have picture magnifiers. Since an online store needs to mimic the experience from a brick and mortar store, customers like to see items up close. The YITH WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier provides the tools to do so, with a magnified version of the product image when a customer scrolls over.

The zoom effect has a default size, but the WooCommerce backend includes settings for adjusting the width and size of the zoom-in. The plugin includes a slider for jumping from picture to picture, and a mobile-off setting removes the magnifier if you feel it’s too distracting on smaller devices.

I’ve heard many young developers say that a rental or booking system like AirBnB isn’t possible unless you code it completely from scratch or from a framework. This isn’t entirely true, since the RnB plugin has an onslaught of features for booking everything from homes to cars. The customers can request a quote through the system, along with dates, pricing and hours.

The developers included all sorts of nifty settings for things like minimum and maximum booking days, price discounts, full calendar order support and security deposit acceptance. You can even negotiate pricing and answer questions through the built-in messaging system.

The WooCommerce Customer Relationship Manager is a customer service dream, offering logging for calls and emails, status assignments for leads and an email communication system for your customers. I particularly like this because if a customer calls or emails you with a purchase order, you can create a customer for them, fill their cart and punch in the payment information.

Filtering through customers is fairly easy, since it has filter tabs for customer status and products. Existing customers are managed with detailed profile pages, and the import tool pulls the rest of the batch in for customer relations later.

It all depends on the type of store you’re running, but you might need to accept file uploads for customizations, design work or consulting. I see the WooCommerce Upload Files plugin as a tool for companies that sell customized products and services.

As an example, a web design company may have a full WooCommerce site with products like website building, maintenance, email marketing and SEO. The customers can buy the services, but what shows the designer what the company is all about? This way, the client can upload customer lists, products, marketing materials and whatever else is needed to complete a job.

Studies often show that the shortest checkout processes boost conversions the most. However, we’ve also seen tests that prove multi-step checkouts are rather fruitful as well. Similar to breadcrumbs, a multi-step checkout shows users exactly where they are in the checkout process. This way, they don’t feel like they’re caught up in limbo where they’re never going to get out.

The steps are clear towards the top of the page, giving users an idea of how much longer they have on your site. The plugin has a fully responsive layout, and you can customize everything from the color of the steps to the shape and location.

I would argue that WooCommerce has some impressive reports for understanding your financial outlook and projecting for the future. However, the Advanced WooCommerce Reporting takes it a step further. The main difference is that it focuses on projected sales reports instead of actual sales. This way, you have a firm grasp on what to expect for the future, and it allows you to benchmark and make goals.

The responsive layout has visual reports with pie and bar charts. Save your reports in multiple formats, and view a full map of the world to evaluate where most of your sales are coming from. Some of the reports include stock lists, refund details, tax reports, projected sales and billing countries.

The WooThumbs solution is a valuable WooCommerce plugin for those interested in making their product images look amazing. Some similar plugins only offer the zoom-in functionality, but this has support for videos, sliders and much more. The image zoom is completely customizable, and the multiple images per variation gives your customers a more in-depth look into what you have to offer.

The responsive layout utilizes touch gestures, and it has a fullscreen gallery for expanding upon the experience for your customers.

The SUMO Reward Points plugin has one of the better points systems for WooCommerce. The loyalty program is built on top of WooCommerce for a seamless integration. You can make your points expire and even ask people to choose a charity for them to donate their points to. The best part is how it lets you specify where customers get points. You might give out points for writing reviews, purchasing products, sharing your site or using coupon codes.

The social media sharing program has beneficial elements to it as well, asking users to post products and purchases on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, all in order to get some points. The points are redeemed when someone checks out from your store, so they just need to be logged into their account to make that happen.

The WooCommerce One Page Shopping plugin is almost like a onepage theme, except it compiles the entire checkout process into that same page. So selling a book wouldn’t redirect people to five different pages. They could add to cart from the homepage or go through the checkout right there.

The whole point of it is to increase your conversions, since the customer can punch in their payment information, personal details and coupons almost seconds after landing on the page.

The WooCommerce Customer Relationship Manager plugin has similar tools, but the Shop as Customer for WooCommerce plugin is cheaper and more lightweight for basic WooCommerce websites. The solution asks you to sign in as one of your customers, where you can then place items in their cart and checkout for them.

This generally happens when you have a customer on the phone or when you start answering their questions through a chat box.

Conclusion

I could talk about the best WooCommerce plugins all day (since there are so many of them,) but it’s time for you to let me know what you think. Go to the comments section and chime in about your favorite WooCommerce plugins. We also want to hear if you’ve had bad experiences with any in the past.

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About Joe Warnimont

Joe is a writer, marketing crash test dummy and adventure seeker. He helps people write, market their writing and embrace their lives through creativity. You can find him riding his bike around Chicago or sharing on his blog, Write With Warnimont.

I am an experienced blogger and internet marketer who loves working with WordPress. I make money on the internet through blogs, content websites and forums.Read More

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